Episode 16: Culling the Herd | Scryer's Gulch

• ‹‹ first
• ‹ previous
• 16 of 28
• next ›
• latest ››

The full moon crept over the town, slipping silver through the bars of the jail where John held Rabbit through his transformation; it glinted faint on Georgie Prake's tears as he sat in the darkened window he'd occupied almost continually since his disgrace; and it shone white on a woman's bare skin. The moon lit the woman only briefly. Her coloring dappled, and she blended into the surrounding shadows. Mamzelle prided herself on her camouflaging, especially chained as she was to the form of a human woman.

She loved hunting. Before Jed captured her, she stalked anything that moved, the wilier the better. Humans generally bored her, unless they knew she was on their trail and they were smart. It might take her a year of trailing some desperate, intelligent man before she caught him unawares. Never women: women were tiresome, their world too circumscribed to make them a challenge. How did Howard the bouncer put it? Like shooting fish in a barrel. Better to chase animals. Something was always trying to eat them, which made them more worthy adversaries; humans had grown used to their status at the top of the food chain.

Now, hunting men satisfied her as it never had before, perhaps because it was not allowed her very often. She supposed the restriction made her hunger for it more--and then, she wanted everyone in town dead anyway.

She stole close to the miner's camp, sticking to shadows; her coloring flickered in patches from rock gray to faded green to dusty brown as she slinked to her favorite stakeout, a hunting blind of sorts among the rocks at the base of an old hillside wash-out. From here, she would wait for one of the men to leave the tent city for a piss.

This far back from town was where the greenhorns camped, the new men, low on the totem pole. The experienced miners knew something waited in the dark, here at the back of the pack, but haste, greed, arrogance and skepticism made the new men scornful, and kept Mamzelle in kills. She never waited long by a demon's standards before a man stumbled too far from the herd, and the sooner the better; the rocks reeked of urine, and worse.

She hadn't been there more than three hours when the uproar of the camp disgorged an obliging victim, wobbling out of the firelight toward her blind: a big man, stinking drunk, but still dangerous-looking. She'd never seen him before, and the state of his kit denoted a recent arrival; he looked a little too clean, and his clothes were still unpatched. "Allo, mon cher," she purred, just loud enough to be heard.

"Wuzzat? Someone here?" called the man, not quite as drunk as Mamzelle had feared; she smiled wider. The more sober, the more fun.

"Over 'ere," she replied, stepping out of the blind and taking on a more natural coloring.

The man stopped in his tracks and whistled. "Whatever they called that stuff, it weren't whiskey. I'm goin blind."

"It is to be believed--I am 'ere," she said, smoothing a hand down her hip. "Do you like me?"

"Lady...why, yer buck naked!"

"You are objecting?" she said. She began edging minutely to his left; he turned unconsciously to face her as she moved.

"N-no! I mean--" He whistled again, took his hat off, and ran a hand through thinning hair. "Lady, what are you doin out here all by yourself with--without yer clothes?"

"Call it...a call of courtesy. Eef you like Mamzelle, maybe you come see me an my girls in town?"

"Mamzelle--you're that Frenchie who runs the Palace! Lady, I ain't got the kinda money fer you!"

The greenhorn hadn't noticed she'd cut him off from the camp, and her smile grew. "No money, this time. You have des amis in this place? Friends?"

"No, ma'am, not a soul."

"You wish to be mon ami, perhaps?"

His uncertain smile strengthened. "On the house? Oh, yes, ma'am, I surely would!"

"Très bien, very good," she leered, her teeth finally long and sharp, and her eyes ruby red. "Mes amis, they run very fast. Can you run very fast, chèri?"

"Run? Why would I wanna run?" His smile faltered. He took in her nails, lengthening into scythes, and stepped back only to discover rocks behind him and Mamzelle between him and the safety of the camp. "Lady," he whispered, "what are you?"

"What I am matters not, I think. What matters is 'ow fast you can run before I catch you. I have a nature merciful tonight. I promise you five minutes' head start."

"Help!" he screamed, but the revelers in the camp were used to such cries; if some newcomer were getting rolled for his stake, why borrow trouble?

He yelled again for help. Mamzelle said, "There will be the time for the screaming, mon ami. Now it is the time for the running. Run!" The greenhorn lumbered up the rockfall, and Mamzelle sighed. Perhaps she should've given him ten minutes; it seemed speed had been sacrificed for size. Nevertheless, she waited the five minutes--a promise was a promise--and sauntered up the rocks, following his scent into the scrub-covered hills.

He gave her a good enough chase--close on an hour all told, though she ran only at the end, when he had tired of running enough to turn and fight. When she caught him, she held him tenderly in her arms as he thrashed in his death throes, her claws sunk deep into his ribs and her teeth ripping into his shoulder.

Sheriff John and Deputy Rabbit stood over a horribly mangled body the next morning, dumped at the foot of the rockslide. "Doc, what do you think?" John asked an older man dressed in black, crouched by the body.

"I think he's dead, Sheriff, is what I think," said the doctor, not bothering to look up as he coolly rolled the body from one side to another. "Hard to breathe without a neck."

John looked to the sky for patience. "Dr Horridge, I'm asking you for your professional opinion on what might have killed him--cougar? Wolf? Bear?"

"Man with really sharp teeth?" added Rabbit.

"I know what you're asking. Let a man in a grim profession enjoy himself a little." Dr Horridge shook his head. "Can't rightly say, Runnels. Coulda been any kind of animal with claws, but I tell you: it'd have to be a damned big one--near as I can tell, it took out his throat with one bite. And a smart one--he wasn't killed here. Something dragged him." Horridge stood up, stretching his back till it popped. "I'm getting old. And whatever it was, it wasn't hungry. Didn't really eat so much as savage him. Not many predators'd do that. Except, of course, for Man."

"Huh," said John, slipping his thumbs into his gunbelt. "Well, thanks, Doc. By the by, how're the two from the Lucky Pint doing?"

Horridge shook his head. "Well, it's a funny thing. The one hit on the head, looks like he'll make it. He's sitting up, talking a little--slow, but he was never a college professor. His friend, who laid him out? Liverish. Yellow eyes, when you pry 'em open. He's never woken up yet. I don't think he'll make it through the week. So no hanging for the hoi polloi. Now if you gentlemen will excuse me, I've got breakfast bespoke at the Hopewell." He took off his glasses, clapped a low top hat on his head, and pushed through the circle of miners come to rubberneck.

"This man have any friend who can do for him?" John asked the onlookers. A few heads shook; no one came forward. "All right then, we'll call the undertaker in," he sighed. He walked through the miners and back toward town, Rabbit following behind.

"'Nother one, Johnny," said Rabbit, shaking his head. "Every full moon some greenhorn goes down, right around this spot. People are starting to talk."

"I know." John waited until they were out of anyone's hearing, then said, "I think we've got another werecritter here who isn't quite as peaceable as a bunny."

"I think you may be right, brother mine." They walked into the main street, both troubled. "How many people know about me, Johnny?"

"Me. Prake. Jamie. Aloysius if you can call him 'people.' Miss Duniway, now. Why?"

Rabbit shook his head. "If anyone were to find out I change on the full, he might take it into his head that I turn into something worse than a jackrabbit."

"It won't happen, Rab," John said firmly.

They were at the jail. John felt eyes on him and looked up to see Mamzelle, standing on her balcony at the Palace drinking her morning coffee. She wasn't respectable, but John didn't consider himself above anyone; he touched his hat. She inclined her fine head, and then gave him a wide, contented smile before she turned back into her boudoir. Most men would take it well to have a beautiful woman smile like that at him, thought John--even if she was a demon. But something about the set of her shoulders, the loll of her head, brought him up short; he shivered, though he didn't understand why.

• ‹‹ first
• ‹ previous
• 16 of 28
• next ›
• latest ››